Winter's Sister
by DareSheSaysIt
Summary: Re-telling the tale of a young woman's desperate journey to find her sister, Winter's Sister explores Disney's beloved Frozen in a setting closer to ours and with secrets and reveals darker and more sinister from its animated counterpart.
1. Chapter 1 - Missing

**Short Summary/Teaser:** Re-telling the tale of a young woman's desperate journey to find her sister, Winter's Sister explores Disney's beloved _Frozen_ in a setting closer to ours and with secrets and reveals darker and more sinister from its animated counterpart.

Beautiful, accomplished and above all enigmatic, Elsa Andersen is New York's illustrious sweetheart who suddenly goes missing without a trace the second week her little sister Anna is back from boarding school. As the weather in New York drops to record-breaking, bone-chilling temperatures that shocks the city and the world in summer time, the case for Elsa's whereabouts grown even colder. With New York buried deep in heavy snowfall and with no development in Elsa's missing persons case literally in sight, Anna can only begin to unravel where her sister might be by starting at the secrets her sister fought so desperately to keep and difficult to let go.

_**Author's Disclaimer:** Anything that is remotely recognizable is not of my own creation. This story is based loosely on Disney's animated feature Frozen and is inspired by the characters and themes explored in the movie.  
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><p><strong>CHAPTER ONE<strong>

**_ANNA_  
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No one knew my sister better than I did.

I could say that then.

Then was two days ago, when my sister and I marched arm in arm across the gleaming floors of Saks Fifth Avenue, its neat, pristine aisles blooming with the season's latest stock of floaty summer dresses in every imaginable print and shorts and skirts barely short enough to leave much to the imagination, cut in every fabric available to the known world. I'd mock her taste in cuts and hemlines: you'd be lucky to see any higher than my sister's knees or elbows, I had advised more than one man. She was a blonde, long-haired Audrey Hepburn, out of time, the lines she hid herself behind crisp and austere, her sexuality barely a whisper compared to the shrill, deafening boom of her peers', even her full, gold spray of hair tamed in large elaborate braids. She'd chide me in turn for choosing more feminine, revealing pieces. It never mattered: the eyes were always on her in the end.

"Don't you hate her?" My wide-eyed roommate at Harrogates Ladies College had wondered often and out loud, the question always rolling off her tongue smooth and slick as oil despite her clipped Londoner's accent as though it was the most natural question to ask, the way you'd ask someone instantly "are you okay?" after you see them get hurt. The most natural question for anyone to ask after they'd seen and examined photographs of my sister in the Times, her at a highly anticipated fashion show, at an exclusive screening of some independent film, at an art gala for a new up and coming artist, a fund raiser for New York's most down trodden and displaced.

The way her ice-blue eyes caught the camera's hungry gaze intimately, feeding it promises, the lights falling on the slopes of her patrician face with the kindness of a mother's hand. It was impossible to take an awful picture of her, no matter what the side or angle. A peek of her mile-long legs through the slit of her dress, a flash of her rare, elusive Mona Lisa smile, often seductively over her shoulder—it never took long for anyone to fall in love with my sister. I should have hated her. Maybe. She would have made anyone invisible next to her, but with my sister next to me, I looked like a practical joke. We could not be more the anti-thesis of each other in image: where my sister was as tall and statuesque as any currently working, sought-after runaway model, I was average in height and build, neither elegantly slender nor adorably petite, simply average. Extraordinary and ordinary; memorable and forgettable, Elsa and Anna.

Then was a night ago, when we paired our matching glasses of sharp merlot with laughter strong enough to almost split our dresses at the seams. She was in a regal long-sleeved Stella McCartney dress the singular shade of blue just before it turned pitch, the hem sweeping the floor flirtatiously every time she stood from the table to catch the attention of the already enamored waiter or to excuse herself momentarily for the girl's room. My sister: so conspicuous even when she wanted to disappear, sink seamlessly into the background, as upright and slender as the walls she wanted to blend into.

I fiddled with the skirt of my bright print Mary Katrantzou dress, skin-tight and squeezing the freckled, sun-spotted thighs of my legs far too close together as I sat. My sister leaned forward in her seat, gently brushed back the wayward tangles of my fiery red hair away from my equally red face and smoothed them over my shoulders, restoring the smile on my lips with that gesture that was so motherly and reassuring, her wordless way of saying: _you look beautiful_. This was why I could I never hate my sister. In the end, as I stood awkwardly in front of countless mirrors and laid crumpled in many well-made beds contemplating the sheer number of my freckles and the jelly-like softness of my thighs and stomach, she was the only one in the world who could love me as fiercely as I hated myself and even more.

Now was this minute. I was holding a script; it grew softer and more wrinkled in the palms of my hand, what little I had read of it fainter in the hollow of my skull. I was in front of a podium microphone that looked like a punch coming towards me the very first second I saw it, the flash of what seemed like a thousand cameras flooding my view in a white so sharp it scarred my retinas. Next to me was my sister in twenty-two by twenty-eight inches of thick glossy poster board, smiling above a telephone number in large black serif font, her hands cut off from view and nowhere to grasp.

I opened my mouth to speak, expecting nothing but cries stunted with the roof of mouth to tumble out in tangles and pieces down the curve of my neck. I smoothed the sheet of paper with my script on it against the podium with hands I didn't feel but saw shaking. I breathed in air that sliced, air that felt forever to reach and soothe the point in my chest where it felt like a mallet was driving a pike right through.

"It is impossible for you to live in this city without knowing Elsa Andersen," I began miraculously, clouding the microphone with my breath, "A philanthropist first and a businesswoman second, she has been active in her support and participation in the revival and restoration of some of New York's city parks, landmarks and neighborhoods that have slipped through the cracks over the recent years due to inadequate municipal funding. She has been able to do this being at the forefront of Andersen Vista Architects, of which she is the chief executive officer and whose enormous success is credited to her ingenious and keen understanding of the needs of today's practical New Yorker. She is only twenty-years-old. And I cannot be prouder to call this amazing woman my sister."

A beat. I gripped the edges of the podium stand like a lifeline, realizing with a small, panicky swallow that my legs would give away beneath me if I didn't. I discovered too late that I should have read right through the script, no breaks for breath, no pauses for effect, the lump in my throat had doubled in size during the minute I had not spoken and my voice split around it like a fast-threading current around a monstrous rock when I opened my mouth again, "It is with a heavy heart that I announce that my sister is missing. She was last seen on June 12th at our Upper East Side loft at 1:14 a.m. on building cameras when she returned home from a late appointment and was not seen leaving the building or in the building since. She made no calls or left no messages after that time and has been unreachable."

That night, in her floor-length, elegant Stella McCartney dress, my sister with her sensuous sliver of a smile that twisted at the corners with a secret I had spent the whole of my life trying to guess at. "I'll see you in the morning," Elsa wound her arms beneath the gangly weight of mine and held the back of my head fully, guiding my face against her shoulder that was cloaked in the sweet, floral notes of her perfume. "You work too hard," I told her for the thousandth time, turning our night-end hug beyond the doors of the restaurant into a little dance as I swayed her tall, near-Amazonian frame from side to side. "I do it for you," we both said, Elsa warmly, easily, and me, in teasing, mock repetition of the many times she had said it to me before for reassurance.

I was being pulled back, away from then and back to now, back to the podium, then away from the podium, two massive hands, one on each shoulder, holding me up to keep me from falling, guiding me away from the collective fanatic drone of the reporters, film crews, photographers, esteemed well-wishers, their operatic static going toe to toe against the rising white noise in my head. I wanted whoever held me to let me fall, fall fast again into the memory of that night, just outside the restaurant, just at the last second before Elsa allowed her arms to slack and return back to her sides, just before Elsa pulled away. I jerked forward, wanting to keep her there. In my mind she did not leave. In my mind we went back home together, giggling, back to our Lennox Hill loft and slipped into our cozy silk pajamas, sipping on virgin mimosas while we watched Sex and The City turned to mute, fancying ourselves cutting-edge, battle-hardened television writers with our outrageous, outlandish attempts at dialogue and cohesive plot.

I jerked forward in real time, back against the podium and told the world that had not known my sister apparently any more than I did, none of us had any idea, "She is the only family I have, she is all I have. Please, if you know where my sister is, please help me find her," I cried.


	2. Chapter 2 - Cold Case

****CHAPTER TWO****_**_**  
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_****ANNA****_

_A Month Later_

It was a shiver racing down the length of my spine that snapped me awake from dreams riddled with running. I jolted with a start, my breath clouding in the air as I raised myself up from my sister's bed in a half-panic and peered out of heavy, sleep-stained eyelids at the small space of window that I had neglected to conceal behind the drapes the night before. The same inexplicable sight had greeted every baffled New Yorker for the last month now: snow, inches and inches of it every morning, high enough to bury and immobilize cars before they could leave sidewalks and lots, high enough to completely rob basement and lower-floor apartment windows of their knee-high views, high enough that the city had fleets of giant trucks armed with snow plows and salt spreaders fully operational and endeavoring to clear roads as early as 4 am.

Unprecedented record snowfall, _in the month of July_, the news stations didn't so much announce it as they exclaimed it, live on the air, the news anchors themselves shaking their head or dropping their jaws in utter confusion. Consummate Forensic meteorologists and climate researchers made the harrowing trek to New York in bright-eyed droves, most from out of the country, determined to narrow down and expose the cause of the state's winter in July. Until last week, of course, when an official statement from the John F Kennedy Airport was released, citing that the take off and landing of planes on site was no longer deemed safe due to the ice thickening on runways, becoming nasty sleets, death traps, and that New York airspace was barely navigational for flights with the low-visibility caused by the rapidly falling snow.

"Anna, promise me," My boyfriend Kristoff pleaded with me over the phone last night, "I can arrange for the charter jet to leave tomorrow evening at Long Island, it's been hard on you this last month, I know, but it's dangerous for you to keep staying there until they sort this weather out." Sort the weather out, as if it were up to us, up to anyone. Every day our phone calls would end like the one last night, with Kristoff begging me, over and over, to leave, _please_,his soothing, warm, leathery voice sounding like it had been dragged hard through nails with every attempt to convince me, and with me slowly but surely snapping, melting into tears against the receiver, apologizing, saying I couldn't go, I couldn't.

Not when every day I spend in the city people care less and less about my sister who has been missing for five weeks and more and more about leaving to go somewhere warmer, perhaps tropical, somewhere where they could redeem half the shitty summer they lost to this unforgiving snow. No one will care if my sister is in the hands of someone who might hurt her, who has already been hurting her, with no way out, hurting in her ways that will break her, not just skin, not just bone, but what makes her Elsa, for the rest of her life. No one will care if my sister stumbles out onto the road, mutilated, maligned, mistreated, resurfacing miraculously after all this time, only to be swallowed whole by the interminable snow, to be discovered too late, _oh if only someone had been there sooner_, the desperation and suffering on her face frozen solid. No one will care if my sister is dead, no one but me.

There had been no promising leads in the investigation, hadn't been any tip-offs or sightings reported to the hotline that were remotely beneficial or verifiable. The police pulled my sister's phone records, starting from the night of her disappearance and going backwards up to three years: her personal mobile, her business mobile, her direct line at the office. There was nothing that shouldn't have been there, nothing amiss.

They had interviewed me initially but because I had spent most of every year since I was eleven at North Yorkshire at Harrogates Ladies' College in England, I couldn't offer much in the way of my sister's habitual comings and goings, a detailed picture of her day-to-day schedule. Not that they had to look very far: my sister was scrupulously meticulous with her time, her weeks two, three, and four of every month planned and documented by her fastidious secretary Margaret as she was still in the middle of week one, not a block unaccounted for, not an hour wasted.

Except for the unexplained late-night meeting Elsa had the night she disappeared, just after our extravagant dinner at Gilt on Madison, the one that had her returning to our loft at 1:14 in the morning. I must have watched the black-and-white surveillance footage of her coming back to the loft about a hundred times, the end looping back to the start without fail in the stubborn, jammed up movie player of my mind, the one that lets you replay most of your recallable memories like your Life's PVR, the exhausted, worn-out clip of my sister walking past the building entrance and across the front lobby, fast-forwarding, pausing, rewinding, and never stopping. I swear it's all I see when I close my eyes: Elsa in her long blue dress and her now slightly disheveled up-do, undone just a little by the wind… or by a man? There's certainly one angle the police refused to give up on.

"Was she seeing or dating anyone? Did she have a boyfriend?" The lead investigator, 42-year-old Detective Melissa Bromley, wanted to know, flipping a curtain of her thick, out-of-the-box dyed chestnut-brown hair over her right shoulder as she leaned forward fluidly on her desk, seated across me, the first time I was called down to the station, her crisp, grey eyes narrowed, hungry for the name of a man whose secret romantic involvement with my sister may have gone sour, may have just spurned him to foul play. But there was no one. Strange, I knew, unbelievable even. The time I did spend with my sister, which was every summer, we devoted cheerfully to bonding over clothes, food, traveling, the latest book to drown yourself in, this new musician in Europe or Canada that you just have to listen to. It's not like I never asked. Elsa would just smile shyly, shake her head a little too quick like warding off a bad or embarrassing memory and shrug her shoulders, "I'm too busy to date." No one could argue with that. My sister took over for my parents at Andersen Vista when they had passed away as soon as she was old enough, and had spent the entire time before that being tutored closely and rigorously in the privacy of our loft by some of the most well-regarded private professors and instructors money could afford.

"Why couldn't she have gone to an Ivy League school? She was clearly brilliant. And yourself, why not go to school in New York?" Bromley had been genuinely curious. I sat aghast, not truly knowing what the answer was myself. It was just the way things were, how my parents had wanted it. They wished deeply for me to experience the world differently than my sister who they had regretted keeping sheltered and shut out from the rest of the world. "They were possessive of me, Anna," Elsa had explained to me gently once when I was nine, my head heavy with the weight of a billion questions on her lap as she stroked back silk-like tangles of my pale red hair, "I almost died as a little baby, not yet even one-years-old. They wanted to keep me close after that, acted like I was made of glass."

As the police began to piece more and more who Elsa was over the past few weeks like gathering countless, scattered fragments of a cracked vase the end result was a small, prickly, and jagged mural of a truth that hadn't truly sank in until now, all the edges determined to dig themselves deep into my skin so I wouldn't forget: your sister was _alone_, day in and day out, through the long, grueling work hours, through the endless succession of interviews, appointments, meetings, brunches, dinners with business associates, potential backing partners, promising suppliers, charming investors, right down to when she went to bed, she was _alone_.

But it was a solitude of her own perfect making. No close, personal friends, no fiancé or boyfriend, my sister could have made the time, she could have devoted some part of herself to forming and cultivating such relationships. She chose to retreat instead into my parents' empire, to a smooth alcove of herself where she felt safe to play pretend: successful businesswoman—powerful, precise, smart, and seemly. Never vulnerable, never personal.

And so where do you start? When the trail is already so cold from the first footfall? I was supposed to be the key, the one person she ever let in, the closest thing she had to a best friend. And yet she chose still, in her own way, to maintain her distance. She could have pulled me out of boarding school, had me go to one of the top-notch private schools in New York, nurture me under her wing, keep me close, but that was far _too close_ for comfort for Elsa. And so even five weeks later, no one knew where to start.

I began combing the angry tangles out of my waist-length hair, mostly from frustration, partly for appearance. Our family chauffeur, Reginald, was scheduled to drive me to the exclusive, sectioned off Long Island airstrip in about two hours where a jet lying in wait would be set to take me to Paris. To Kristoff. "Babe, it's not like you don't care about Elsa, you do, anyone can see that, I can see that," His words from last night began to lay over me like a giant downy blanket, delivering warmth, his confidence in me something I can wrap myself in as the burgeoning cold from outside swarmed me in time with my festering guilt,

"You're not abandoning her. It's just impossible to make any headway where you are at the moment; you're risking your health. Some space will allow you to look at the case with a whole new perspective. Maybe you're just too close to it right now." Perhaps a small break was in order, just a few days to clear my head, some distance, relax with Kristoff.

I pulled a tight, cream-colored sweater over my head, shook my just-combed hair free with my fingers. I picked up a pair of dark jeans from the palatial walk-in closet I shared with Elsa. We had split the closet right down the middle: you would guess Elsa to be forty sometimes with her strict, unwavering taste in dark and muted colors, vintage-style shoes. They sat and hung there in the light of the dusky morning, lonely for her curves. "She'll be back," I assured them just as much I was assuring myself. I couldn't begin to fathom how and often I found myself bursting into tears at the next second, without warning, imagining Elsa hurt in the most brutal ways at the hands of some sick stranger. I had to keep images like that away from my mind instead of hanging them there, tacking them lovingly onto the walls, framing them, my sad, shaming gallery of _look at what you've done, if only you had insisted she go home with you_. Worry, anxiety, horror, sadness, and guilt, none of it will get me my sister back. I had to be strong like she was. _Like she is_. My sister was still alive. I knew it. I could feel it.

I shimmied into my dark jeans, impatiently yanking them higher and higher on my pale, freckled legs, the cold snug denim electrifying my resolve. I was hurriedly working my belt through the loops of my jeans when I heard my cellphone vibrating insistently on the dresser beside Elsa's bed. It must be Kristoff, making sure I hadn't changed my mind for the fortieth time. I walked over distractedly, my eyes still fixed on the task of successfully fastening my belt. I answer the call without even staring at the screen or saying a quick hello, "Kristoff, hey, I'm just getting ready, I'm pretty much all-"

"Anna, you don't know who I am. Please don't drop the call-"

I raised my eyes to the screen immediately, pulling it away from the side of my face so I could examine the caller's number. It was a New York number I didn't recognize. The voice was definitely male, he sounded young, shy, hesitant, like the phone call had been something he'd been working himself up to do for the better part of a day, the way you steeled yourself when you were about to undertake the nerve-wracking task of asking someone out on a date. But this was definitely not a social call. I felt the bottom of my stomach twist and tighten; it suddenly felt much colder in the room. _Could this be Elsa's abductor?_

"This is Anna Andersen, I'm listening. Who are you? How did you get this number?" I bit my lip from talking anymore, cursing myself inwardly. _Shit_. Too many questions, I prayed I didn't scare him off. I had to keep him on the phone for as long as humanly possible. That's what reruns of Law & Order taught me anyway.

"You need to know something about your sister. I'm someone she knows, I need to show you something. It's really important, I swear it'll help with the investigation." He was whispering diligently into the phone, as though afraid he might be overheard.

"Why can't you tell me over the phone?" I was curious.

"You have to see it to believe it," He contended, the tone of his voice growing increasingly anxious.

I had no idea what he was trying to show me or what I needed to know. Elsa didn't _know_ anyone else, certainly not enough and with such a degree of closeness to share with them what sounded like an incredible secret.

But honestly, it was Elsa no one knew, not even, I'm heart-broken to say, by her only sister, her only family. Her missing person's case was growing colder—literally and figuratively—with each passing day. I bit my bottom lip. I had to entertain every possible lead and this person chose to come to me directly instead of the police, had somehow managed to get a hold of my phone number… from Elsa, presumably.

"We have to meet in a public place," I offered gently.

"Of course,"

"You know who I am. Is it okay if I can get a first name?"

Immediate silence on the other end of the line. I opened my mouth to retract the question, to let him know that it didn't matter, I changed my mind, to chirp that it was okay but then he said-

"Olaf. My name is Olaf."


	3. Chapter 3 - The Storm Inside

**CHAPTER THREE**

_**ELSA**_

_A Month Before The Disappearance_

If you were lucky, the worst thing that happened when you felt scared was that you dropped something by accident, or that you felt the sharp surprise of your heart seizing painfully in your chest for a second like someone had reached in and squeezed it tight, tight with their fingers. Maybe you cried. Maybe you held yourself together literally; your hands gripping the sides of your arms to keep yourself from being undone and collapsing like a house of cards. Maybe you screamed, and maybe people heard, maybe they laughed too. If you were lucky, that was the worst.

I was six-years-old when I realized I was not lucky. You don't normally remember a lot of things from when you were six, the memories are sifted through and stared at with the bottom of a tall glass, everything hazy, a patchwork of color, a distinct emotion or two from when you fell and scraped your knee or when you cried furiously, searching for your parents through the forest of legs at the mall-

But this memory stands tall like the stubborn blade of grass the mower kept missing, poking out, defiant and sharp, prickling you when you walked by it, sometimes sharp enough to cut. This memory towered over all the others and left them in its poisonous, sweeping shade, so that even the happy ones were stained sad and the sad ones deepened to an impossibly impenetrable black.

First, I must say this: no one could say no to Anna. She was fire and wildness and a dare too delicious to pass up made compact and flesh. It's why her hair burst from her scalp in the shade of flames and why she was given the most beautiful smile in the world, so you would say yes every time to whatever cockamamie, hare-brained adventure she would pull from thin air like a magician, an adventure that left you breathless each time. That day four-year-old Anna wanted to fish—at 6 am of course.

"The fish will be sleepier, hungrier!" She reasoned in her most conspiratorial, most diabolical toddler voice, her warm, little fingers already wrapped tight around one of my hands, my own fingers rarely warm anymore. She had managed to find me underneath my heavy confection of blankets, her syrupy, milky scent flooding my nostrils as she crawled onto my bed the way she so often did back in our New York home when our parents were still alive.

The summer that year was surprisingly cooler than I had ever recalled our summers being at our Southampton family lake house. The heat barely rose above my knees and the air was moist, always, with the sweet, slick promise of summer rain. Anna and I had zipped up our tiny windbreakers over our equally thin cotton nightgowns. We muddied the lace-trimmed hems and where the skirt met our knees from digging up snails and earthworms for bait from our mother's then well-tended vegetable garden.

"Anna, don't!" I gasped as she popped one of my mom's prized, unbelievably miniature heirloom tomatoes—a bright, cheerfully yellow one—easy as you please into her little mouth. "Don't worry, mom won't mind," Anna beamed at me and I knew as my little sister waddled past me, her pale pink nightgown weighed down by the soil that she was right. Anna was the relief, the light, sunny intermission in between my saddening, disappointing acts of sickliness, close calls with death, then this monstrosity. Anna could run through fields barefoot and roll down fields with scrapes and cuts she couldn't feel. She would trip and fall and be back up standing on her heels in a second, no kisses or ice cream or over-priced medical treatments to banish the pain away. Anna was my parents' redemption, a smiling, and red-haired reminder than not everything had gone completely wrong. She was the apple of my parents' eyes.

With earth-worms and snails writhing, slimy and earth-stained in our zipped up windbreaker pockets and balls of sewing thread clutched tightly in our soiled fingers, we raced outside of the lake house and made for the property's private deck that stretched out thirty-feet-long, high and sturdy, over the still, quiet waters of the secluded lake. Anna was ahead of me, her tiny feet with their rosy heels rising up fast behind her as she bounded down the deck, giggling uncontrollably, eager to get to the edge.

The distinct sound of a snap cut through Anna's spirited laughter fast and clean like a razor: it was a twig, broken in two underneath the weight of someone's heel. I stopped and turned and saw a man standing just a short distance away, partly concealed by the shade of the trees and the thick, abundant shrubbery that bordered the lake. Our property was a secluded lake house nestled in the heart of the woods and I did not recognize the man in the slightest-

He was tall, reedy, what little hair that remained on his long, stretched-looking head wispy and white. He wore rubber boots far too big for his pole-thin legs. The legs he hid behind baggy black trousers held up with a belt that was cinched way too tightly over an orange polo shirt and a seemingly non-existent waist. He licked his lips at us, a terrible smile blooming where he raised a bony finger as if to say 'Be quiet'. He took a step forward, away from the bushes and out into the clearing, towards the deck, towards me. Towards Anna.

I felt fear bubble up furiously inside me like water boiling over fast. I tried to open my mouth to speak, to tell Anna to stay where she was but my throat suddenly felt too dry and swallowing at that second seemed impossible, my jaws refused to shut close as if a certain gear had jammed. The man was only an alarming ten feet away, his beady eyes looking unnervingly manic in their dark circles and narrowed eyelids.

I took a frightened step back, my hands shaking at my sides and then I slid, swayed backward a little. The deck beneath me instantly froze solid, a sheet of thick, immaculate ice raising me, first starting where my foot landed and then outwards, erratically, all the way to where the man stood where he slipped and fell on his back with a hard crash and a stunned shout that stole Anna's full attention away from the water.

"Elsa?" Anna cried worriedly, as the ice began to dart in her direction within seconds like a jagged serpent, curling right below her bare feet and she began to slip and slide as the ice melted a little with her heat, sending her skating wildly towards the deck's edge.

"No, Anna, wait!" I screamed, instinctively reaching my hand out to her as if she could reach me and a blast of ice flew from my outstretched palm, unbidden, and hit Anna right against one small pigtail, the impact knocking her out and the icy spray freezing the pigtail solid and she fell backwards, right over the deck.

What happened next, I still can't explain. I lunged forward with tears warping my vision, my arms thrown out in front of me as if I could hold her in place from where I stood and that's exactly what happened: ice the shape of giant, misshapen hands crystallized out of nowhere, right beneath where Anna would have fallen straight for the water and caught her small, limp body like catcher's mitts, pitching her back to the deck hard before splashing a second later, one after the other, into the lake.

The ice on the deck didn't melt for days. The man who had trespassed our quaint, little Southampton property was a forty-one-year-old Walter Gitts, one of the hired groundskeepers at the Southampton Golf Range, just over an hour's drive away from the lake house. My mother, Anna, and I had visited to enjoy a lunch or two at the range after my father's many rounds of golf with friends and business associates. The old codger must have been eyeing Anna and I for weeks—they had found items in the woods: a toothbrush, a ratty-old sleeping bag that had been pissed in, empty bags of beef jerky, some crushed cans of beer, that indicated he had been hiding out there for some time—a week at the very least. He was arrested for trespassing the same day he snuck up on me and Anna. My family wrapped up our summer at the Hamptons shortly after that week. Because a child molester, disturbingly enough, was the least of our concerns.

Anna returned to New York with a silly Mia Farrow haircut, playing with my singular blonde braid on the long drive back home petulantly, mourning her strawberry locks. The pigtail I had frozen solid was unsalvageable, it had turned to ice entirely, down to the root. My mother had been horrified realizing she couldn't simply melt it down. She had hacked off much of Anna's beautiful red hair tidily within an hour's time after my parents fetched us from the deck, while Anna had remained fitfully asleep from the shock of what had happened. I was literally a hair away from freezing my little sister's head solid, from watching it crack into pieces as my powers threw her back onto the dock. My father was inconsolable.

"We have to fix this," I could hear him tell my mother despairingly behind their shut bedroom doors, could almost see his hands raking through his thick, sandy hair, anything to occupy them from shaking. I was a problem that had to be fixed. No one had witnessed what had happened thanks to the ungodly hour it had all occurred and the secluded location of our property. No one except for the would-be child molester, hiding out in the woods and his word didn't count for much anymore. And Anna. We had all convinced her it was nothing more than a nasty nightmare when she finally awoke later that morning, a frightening product of her overactive imagination, even as she counted my mother's yellow heirloom tomatoes the day after to still find one missing.

I was a ticking time bomb. I had taught I was getting better that summer. I had taken my pharmaceutical concoctions dutifully, this pill with that pill and that one after noon. I felt submerged once they all went to work underneath my skin like nothing could rise to the surface, not a smile or a scream. I had been on meds since I was four. I had been taught to detach at six-years-old, how to compartmentalize and put the feelings inside of me into tiny labeled boxes titled 'sad' or 'mad' by some of the best psychotherapists money could buy. Emotions were deadly because they fed the beast inside me. I must starve it out patiently in order to kill it. This thing that would react instantly to every goosebump, every tear, every heart murmur or palpitation, every sweat bead that rose out of my pores and turn it all into spears of ice, the coldest sheets, frigid winds. Never be angry, never be scared; never be sad. _Conceal don't feel_. The little mantra my father gave me.

But it kept growing; it became stronger as my parents struggled to cage it with strong medications and much later, with my carefully constructed isolation. So the dosages became higher, the drugs less FDA approved, the administration more direct. I knew how to properly operate a syringe and how to sterilize a needle when I was fourteen. I could recite the exact dosage and the names of the antidepressants, antipsychotics, beta-blockers and benzodiazepines I had been taking since I was four. I could only expose myself for large durations of time to situations that never yielded any type of emotion, where emotion would be of no use. No boyfriends, no friends. Business, strictly business. Mechanical, formulaic. I was a vessel that was being hollowed out: pill after pill, shot after shot, year after year and soon it became normal to feel vacuous, as empty as a jar. I had become a seasoned actor, knowing my mark and perfecting my timing, smile politely here, express neighborly concern there. If I felt anything, I felt only a tenth of it, like catching the last echo of a distant sound.

But there was always Anna. The one person in the world who reminded me that I could still be scared even for a fraction of the feeling, that I could still feel something in this rubber-tough, drug-addled thing I called a heart.

And she was never going to be safe as long as I was around.


	4. Chapter 4 - True Sister

_**Author's Note: **Firstly, to those who have followed this story from the beginning up to now, thank you so much, I truly appreciate your readership! I am doing this note to address a very important question a lovely reviewer has raised and some of you may be wondering as well as to whether not Kristoff and Hans will be playing more prominent roles/will be appearing more in this story and the answer to that is yes! Both Kristoff and Hans are integral to the story and will be more constant figures after these first few chapters get under way._

_Again, thank you so much for reading this far!_

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><p><strong><em>CHAPTER FOUR<em>  
><strong>

**ANNA**

I ordered myself a second cup of tea, my teeth chattering harder still even after I had gulped down the first. Just two tables down, there were two squat men seated across from each other with their shoulders hunched and their voices lowered to exasperated grunts inside a corner booth. They were rubbing their bare hands delicately over the rising steam of their coffees, their hair as alpine white as the snow that continued to pile outside. A woman with mousy blonde hair scraped back in a scraggly-looking ponytail sat alone at the counter. Or should I say slept? Her own cup of coffee had gone unpleasantly cold for drinking, barely sipped and long forgotten as a tangle of her hair rose and fell softly against her face every time she snored, her head seemingly buried miles-deep in her arms.

Together these people and I comprise the early afternoon patronage at Anthony's Diner on West 57th, one of the only few places in the city that remained faithfully open to the public despite the record-breaking low temperatures and the destructive snowfall that split New York in between towering mounds and, in some areas, walls of snow. It was the only place Olaf and I could decide on in terms of an open meeting place. Reginald was beside himself having to chauffeur me to this part of town, his prized, six-thousand-pound escalade barely cutting through some heavily snowed-in streets and skidding once or twice on slippery, frozen-over asphalt despite the car's massive winter tires.

The waitress who couldn't have been a day older than sixteen and who wore her lips in a fashionable frown set my cup of tea acidly on the table without even glancing at me, already turning on her heel before I could quickly utter my "Thanks," and circle my still-gloved hands around the cup. I felt the promise of sweat prick the pores of my temple despite the biting cold outside. I didn't know what to expect from this Olaf. Perhaps _he_ was the secret lover the police were hungrily searching for, who they were certain existed, or perhaps Olaf had tangible information on Elsa's abductor… perhaps he knew Elsa's abductor personally and had decided to betray him or her at the eleventh hour after struggling with his guilt for weeks and weeks on end. It seemed curious that he hadn't turned up already as a figure in the investigation, as a useful source after the police had pried and picked apart Elsa's life as if it were a cadaver they had sliced up and whose insides they had poked and prodded, over and over, with tiny picks and flashlights, leaving no organ unturned, no blemish or scar unexamined.

I was close to cutting the skin on my bottom lip from biting it when the door to the diner swung open, ringing its mournful, little bell and revealing a young man around my age, his head nearly swallowed whole in the hood of his puffy, hunter-green parka jacket and his hands and feet in black gloves and boots that must have been one or two sizes too big for him. He had no trouble shuffling around oddly in his comically giant clothing and he lowered his hood to shake his head free of the snow that had managed to collect on the crown of his spiky brown hair. His dark, russet eyes scanned the weary occupants of the diner and settled on me with nervous certainty just as I hurriedly raised my right hand in a cheery, awkward hello. He smiled sheepishly; his eyes darting to his feet then back up at me as he coughed out, "Hey Anna, I'm Olaf,"

"Hi Olaf, go on, have a seat," I urged, standing from my seat so that I could shoot him what I hoped was a warm, inviting smile and he gingerly pulled a chair across from me, taking off his gloves and shoving them to one side of the table as he lowered himself onto the chair. He nodded to the surly waitress, who up until that point had been busily texting on her phone from behind the counter, and ordered himself a cup of coffee.

I took a nervous sip of my tea, clearing my throat. "I really appreciate you taking the time to come here," I began, resisting the immediate urge to wince as the tea burned all the way down, "To be honest, I'm not sure what to make of this… I hadn't realized my sister Elsa had anyone in the way of friends."

Olaf's eyebrows threaded together in the middle of his forehead to form a mournful expression, "She seemed lonely, yeah. I only knew her a short while but even in that time, especially in the beginning, I could tell she wasn't used to company much." He flashed me a sympathetic smile that showed off one giant front tooth that was oddly charming when taken in with the rest of his boyish, innocent-looking face. It was the type of face you'd see on the front of cereal boxes and cookie tins from the forties, _Leave it to Beaver, _the kind of face you'd instantly picture when you thought of the everyday boy scout.

Olaf looked out the window for a moment, his hands curling and uncurling over the table, restless. "Anna, what I'm about to show you is going to be hard to believe so I need you to just give it a moment to sink in before I explain everything else," His voice dropped an octave as he said this, so low that it quivered noticeably as he struggled to hold the words all at once in his throat. I swallowed then nodded. The questions were already swirling furiously in my head like a school of fish that had been dropped suddenly in a tank. Olaf took his mobile phone out of his pocket, his face suddenly appearing tight as if it'd been twisted and wrung out like a washed t-shirt and I almost asked him to put the phone back, to put it away.

I wasn't sure if I was ready to part with this image I had of Elsa so lovingly cared for in my head: it stood like a giant, gleaming sculpture or mural of a thing that dominated the floor of my mind, made pristine and spotless daily with earnest recollections of our sweetest memories together, from as early on as when we'd fish with our father on the giant lake of our Hamptons summer house, our mother braiding our hair delicately in the early hours of the morning just before we'd race each other to the fishing boat, to the fast-paced summers we'd spend here in the intoxicating heat of the city in our late teens right up to when she had vanished a month ago, going hand in hand to private dinners and late-night shows, conquering every corner of the city like queens-

But I didn't know her. _Hadn't known her_. And it really hurt to admit that, repeatedly, to myself since this awfulness all began. I could describe Elsa easily to a stranger with the words beautiful, smart, poised, elegant, regal, sophisticated, eloquent, sharp—warm. Warm—it's such a vague word that borders on the edge of something deeper, something more significant, a filler of a word. Warm would taste like the salty chips or hard candy you'd eat before dinner to pass the time, something to do not something that actually made you full. Warm told you nothing about my sister. I could just as easily call her nice with the same effect. What scared my sister? What made her the happiest? What was she most proud of? What is her biggest insecurity? When was the saddest she had ever felt? I knew nothing; my idea of her was as perfect and hollow as a shell.

Olaf had plugged a set of white earphones onto his phone, the kind that came standard with the device, was tapping away at the screen with a surgeon's concentration for a second or two before glancing back up at me, biting his bottom lip hard like I had minutes earlier. "Put the earphones on and watch this," He instructed, pushing the phone towards me and I did as I was told, placed one earbud on each ear, then with a quick breath that I sucked in between cold lips, I hit the white play button on the screen with a shaking finger.

Elsa's laugh instantly flooded my ears. It was a different laugh of hers, different from any laugh I had heard from her before except for maybe when we were kids, I could feel it in my lips and in my throat, full and uncontrolled. It looked like Elsa was on a ski slope somewhere, the sky split between the deep plum of a bruise and the sweet blush of a cheek, the moment before the sun rose and bled.

"Olaf this is crazy!" Elsa was saying, the hesitation in her voice forced, weak, giving away to the emotion that stretched her lips wide into a stunning smile: unbridled happiness. "I promise I won't film your face," Olaf's voice insisted with a laugh off-camera and he kept the promise, the camera rarely bobbed up except to reveal the playful tail of Elsa's braid and the sharp point of her chin.

"Okay, here goes," Elsa obliged, almost shy. She took her ski gloves off, tossing them to the ground. She began to move her hands around the other in a careful rhythm as though massaging the space of air gently in between them and it began to light up where her hands didn't meet, first a small glow then a magnificent ball of bluish light that was almost too blinding to look at-

"Holy shit," you could hear Olaf utter under his breath in awe. Then Elsa stepped back and launched the ball into the air with a girlish giggle. Olaf followed it quickly with the camera, making sure to zoom past Elsa's face and the ball exploded into a million glittering snowflakes that could have been shaved off and made of Swarovski crystals for all the exquisite brilliance they were emitting.

"More!" Olaf demanded mock angrily and Elsa blasted impressive hills of snow in a matter seconds from her fingertips, hills that Olaf ran past and kicked down, chuckling wildly as if play-acting as a cartoony villain, her final act a little snowman no higher than her knee, boasting the same endearing front tooth as Olaf's,

"Look it's you!" Elsa shrieked and I could almost see her wicked grin off-frame, the one that inspired Olaf to scowl audibly and say, "Hey!" as he ran up to her with the camera, her back already turned towards him as she bolted down the slope, her arms straight out like the wings of a plane. The camera shook and swayed, failing to catch a single frame clearly as Olaf sprinted hard to catch up with my sister, his breath growing louder and more jagged, the seamless white of the slopes running up to the pretty pinks of the early morning sky, everything, unlike before, tinged with the palest hint of butter-gold as the sun rose steadily beyond the mountains, then finally absolute black as the video reached its end.

I felt Olaf's fingers wound hard around my slim wrists like wire. I looked up from the dim glow of his cell phone screen, not realizing that the video had gone blurry towards the end not purely because Olaf had been running while filming it but because large tears had perched themselves onto my bottom lashes like little glass birds waiting to dive, and that Olaf was holding me in place, right in my seat, against the table because I had stood up unexpectedly without saying a word, my legs wanting to be in time to the furious march of my heart.

"Please," I cried, pleading with him with my watery, burning eyes and my thin voice that sounded as though I was getting choked, the air all of a sudden feeling too heavy to draw up into my mouth, too dense, "I just need a moment outside." I rasped. Olaf gazed at me worriedly, his lips so pushed together it made his mouth nearly threadlike and then just as I was about to repeat myself, he let go, and I launched myself away from the table, yanking the earphones off and resting my hand at a table here and a chair there on the way out and finally against the icy, glazed-over glass of the diner's rickety door from where I stumbled out into the freezing cold in a lead-limbed daze.

I didn't feel my knees smack the ground or the palm of my hands scrape the snow that had begun to pack and turn icy from melting a little under the defiant glare of the sun. Everything was cold, cold, cold except for the tears that streamed over the freckles of my cheeks and the blood that rushed like angry little rivulets in my ears. I could hear nothing but my own sobs, echoing in my own skull as I tried to reign and keep them inside me, allowing them to graze only as far as the frenzied thumping of my chest, no further, but they pushed their way out, sounding weak after their struggle, sounding like they belonged to a child's.

My sister had powers. My sister _was a big kid_.

I folded into myself like an accordion and gasped desperately at the frigid air, my sobs and the unnatural cold were making it difficult to breathe, I started to shake violently and before long could feel the arms of someone around me, safeguarding my warmth, holding me together impossibly tight. Video-Elsa's laugh ricocheted through the coils of my brain and I shook my head, raised my tearful, scorched stare at Olaf who was sitting out in the cold with me, his mouth opening and closing but I couldn't catch the words. And I let out a miserable cry. Wishing it had been Elsa who had wrapped her arms around me on this icy stretch of sidewalk, wishing it was the Elsa in the video I had known all along, and will I ever get to meet her?


	5. Chapter 5 - Melting Heart

_**Author's Note:** Firstly, Happy New Years to everyone! I would like to apologize for not being able to put this chapter as quickly as the others. It is the longest chapter I've written so far in this story and has an unlikely author/point-of-view. Thank you again for reading, I only have appreciation and gratitude for you!_

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><p><em><strong>CHAPTER FIVE<strong>_

**OLAF**

_A month before Elsa's disappearance_

The one day I ever missed work, I was certain I had met the girl of my dreams. No, not my dreams, but a girl made of them, the dreams of a hundred socially maladjusted, awkward, hoodied introverts who spent their entire lives angrily piecing together how the world worked from behind the postered walls of their room, from within the busy walls of their head. It wasn't enough that her hair was spun in flawless braids that recalled fairytales where the page or village idiot might finally be noticed after rescuing her from the clutches of a fiery dragon or from the dungeon of a haggard, pitiless witch. It was those eyes, crystal-clear and unrelenting, that would make you feel truly _seen_ as if you'd never before really existed until her gaze fell on you, had never really existed beyond the double-takes people took with you in a crowd or for the space you occupied in the subway or at a line in a coffee shop. You felt vulnerable inside the pull of those bright eyes, every pore, every uneven crook of your teeth, every misgiving and insecurity under a blonde-haired spotlight that unnerved but that brought you to life, everything about you, not just the raw, jumbled parts that you wished you could hide but the parts that you desperately wished people saw. She saw them and you thought: "I could be real."

The sun had filtered past the stiff grey of my curtains, weak and watered down from the weekend's worth of steady rain outside that marked the beginning of April. I had brewed myself a fresh pot of coffee, black on that particular day, poured myself at least five savory mouthfuls into a black mug decorated with a print of my longtime internet hero: grumpy cat and bold white letters underneath him that spelled NO. I rarely bothered with breakfast beyond the artful mixing of sugary cereal and milk into a bowl like I was tossing the world's most decadent salad, slurping it all up in seconds as I mentally prepared myself for the office. This delicate mental preparation involved me staring out the window of my shoebox apartment in the East Village with a doleful expression as I formulated strategies in the drawing board of mind as to what programming duties at work I should devote the most time to, to speed up the day.

That morning, with my cereal bowl set and growing cold on the sill and my right hand wrapped lazily around the handle of the grumpy cat mug, I was debating between debugging the company's latest freemium mobile app or reworking the coding for our soon-to-be released first-person shooter game, when I glimpsed an anomaly in my regular, pedestrian view of the back of the next-door Chinese supermarket, the dank alleyway where a large supplier truck would stop by later in the morning to drop off all manner of seafood straight from the Jersey docks.

I took a quick gulp of my coffee to add sharpness to my senses, saw for certain that it was in fact a _woman_, her slim right hand on the gritty back alley wall to support her weight as she stumbled almost blindly in the near dark of 5 am. I say anomaly not simply because young women tottering around at this hour was unusual—bar and club stragglers could be still be caught roaming the streets aimlessly at 3 am, but certainly no later—but also because she didn't look like your typical East Villager, in an outfit so mismatched it was meant to be ironically fashionable, no, it was like she had been copied and pasted onto the wrong backdrop and the combination looked almost comical in its clash.

Despite where I stood from behind my apartment window I could see that she was tall, naturally, even without the two-toned heels she teetered on, her long, elegantly braided blonde hair resting against the front of her grey, plush sweater, which was tucked into a pleated brown skirt, all pieces of clothing you wouldn't ever find on a sales rack. Her face, which was rouged beautifully, was crumpled in a mingled look of weariness and queasiness, and before I could lean out my window to yell out, to ask her if she was feeling okay, her whole right side met the rain-washed, grimy road in the span of a second, one shoe coming off as she laid crumpled and open-mouthed on the alleyway like some child's tossed-away Barbie doll.

I panicked instantly, feeling sweat trail from my temples to the back of my ears. _A bad night of drinking? A cocaine overdose? Both? _I left my apartment insufficiently dressed for the cold, in a worn plaid bathrobe, a plain white T, and a pair of sweat pants dotted with wayward drops of coffee and milk from breakfast, adrenaline making me run so fast every object in my vision blended right into the next. The chill I felt as I sailed past two flights of stairs and ran the length of the apartment lobby was immediate, cutting straight through the scratchy plaid of my robe, my flimsy 5-dollar cotton shirt, right down to the jelly marrow of my bones.

"Hey! Hey! Oh my God, are you okay?" I vomited the words out in a loud rush as I neared her coiled figure on the ground. She didn't respond or move, the glamorous curl of her eyelashes perfectly still and dark against the harsh white of her face, it made the stark red of her lips look vampiric. I quickly took a glance around: rarely anyone was up at this hour (something I had mentioned more than once and rather churlishly to my slapdash, fat cat of a boss) and I had left my cellphone in the apartment in my hurry to run out. _Stupid, stupid._

"Shit," I muttered under my breath. I gingerly coaxed her head and shoulders over my left arm, hooking my right against the back of her knees. With a deep breath that shuddered past the length of my body, I pushed off from the ground with my slippered feet, lurching forward dangerously before digging hard right where I stood with the force of my weight. Still, she didn't move. My arms sagged uncomfortably from their sockets and throbbed with a pain that had me gritting my teeth tight as I carefully maneuvered myself and her past the building entrance and every stair step that finally concluded with the scratched-up, thinly-painted wood of my apartment door. I kicked the door open, relieved that a quick survey of my dinky place revealed that nothing had been stolen in the last fifteen minutes, and set the girl down not so gently on my threadbare couch, her body bouncing as she landed askew against the couch cushions.

"Sorry," I whispered to her, smiling ruefully in spite myself. Up close, her beauty took on an even greater devastation, the features of her face infinitely sharp yet delicate like molded clay: the ski-jump bridge of her nose that ended in a beautiful point, her high, sculpted cheekbones, the curve of her chin, the flirtatious swell of her parted lips. Your eyes ran over the grooves of her face like water over stone, over and over, as if you couldn't believe such a person could exist. I shook my head, my cheeks burning. I didn't know who she was or what in the hell a girl like her was doing in this part of the city but she needed help fast. Collapsing like that, as suddenly as she did, might mean she only had a few moments to left before whatever she was suffering from turned hopelessly fatal.

I shook my arms to restore feeling in them before shutting the door, and rummaged through my work desk for my cell phone. I rarely used the damned thing and would sometimes leave it in random places in my apartment neglected for days. I yanked open this drawer and that, scattered some pens, pencils, paper clips across the tabletop from upending a little tin box I always deposited things into: nothing. I whirled around in a tight-lipped frenzy, went to the foot of my bed to reach for a pair of jeans that had grown cold from being discarded on the floor the night before, maybe I had left it in my back pocket: only my wallet and keys. I let out a deep, frustrated sigh that longed to be an outright scream, reached for my green hoodie that I spotted out of the corner of my eye strewn on the arm of the couch, my hands already fishing the front pockets when a scream that had the weight and jaggedness of a stone was hurled at me.

I leapt back from instinct, shocked that it had come from _her_, the girl, fully awake now, her eyes, a magnificent, icy blue, round and tearful with terror. She inched back, her legs and hands desperate to put some distance between us, she was pushing back on the couch cushions with them as she sat up and started sputtering, "Who are you!? How did I get here?" I continued to back away, creating even more distance, desperate to give her all the assurance world. I held out my hands in front of me to show her that they were completely empty, "Hey, hey relax. You collapsed outside, I saw you from my apartment window. I brought you here so I could call an ambulance-"

"I collapsed outside?" She shot a nervous look out the window, apparently not pleased with what she saw or with this bit of information as she started to collect her knees to her rising chest and held them there tightly, her head shaking from side to side, "No, no, no-" She murmured, tears springing from the corners of her eyes, now closed, and just as I was about to open my mouth to ask her what was wrong the distinct biting crackle of ice silenced me, so foreign and out-of-place I released the breath I'd been holding since her scream and was stunned to find it cloud in the suddenly frigid air.

The ice bloomed from where she sat on the couch cushions, spears of piercing, crystalline white, out and wide, like the arms of a snowflake, lengthening from underneath her, sticking out onto the couch, almost splitting the walls, spilling right onto the floor. Her eyes, opened again, widened in panic at me seeing this and more ice sprouted, exploding from random places, this time without a trace of elegance but monstrously, no longer beautiful but deadly, the spikes sharper, whiter, resembling the teeth of a quickly closing jaw. Her tears were freezing against the slopes of her face, she shook not from the cold but from the violence of her sobs: _she was scared for me_. I felt tears on my own face, the ice cutting me fast on my right ankle, on the side of my left hip, tearing a whole right into my robe just underneath my right arm pit, just narrowly missing my left ear as the ice continued to spear and drive me back relentlessly onto the wall.

And I smiled. The sight of it was so disarming that she stopped crying for a second.

"Don't be scared. Nothing bad is going to happen, you're safe now," I told her, tears leaking into my smile. At that moment I saw her on the edge, that fucking edge, not far from the edge where my mother stood five years ago, beyond the glinting metal railing and underneath the groaning steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, just one heart-breaking second before she walked right out into the air. _Nothing bad is going to happen, you're safe now._ To a mother who didn't know why she nurtured such disturbing, hateful fantasies in her head of hurting those closest to her, to a mother so mentally unstable and scared of her increasingly violent thoughts that she took her own life in front of her only son. _Don't be scared_. How my mother had looked at me before the jump, her face not knowing which way to twist, hating that she had to leave—her crumpled eyes couldn't tear away from the sight of me—but hating what her mind had deteriorated to, a loosely coiled, rotting, ill thing.

"You're a good person, you would never hurt anyone, please stop doing this to yourself," I said again, a replay loop from the past, not seeing the girl in front of me but my mother clearly as I did that night when I was a gawkier, pimple-faced boy of thirteen, my mother's drugstore mascara running down the length of her unwashed face that she'd scratch up from her forehead to her chin during her fits of anxiety, worse and more uncontrolled at that moment when she paced her lonely, little spot on the bridge.

"Nothing bad is going to happen, you're safe now," I kept repeating it, again and again, crying harder and harder each time and I didn't see that beyond my tears the spikes of ice had eventually receded, didn't feel the temperature in the room rise as I slumped to the floor breathless with my back against the wall, didn't feel the girl's cold, slender fingers on my face as she stroked my cheeks and raised my face to hers, told me it was _okay, everything was okay now, thank you._

Her name was Elsa. I didn't know what was more impossible to believe: that she had incredible, nearly irrepressible cryokinetic abilities or that she was willing to tell someone like me about them, some dopey, sniveling stranger she'd just met. That day I had called in sick for work, for the first time in what I prided to be a disciplined, worker bee life, had made Elsa a quick, warm lunch as the ice she created dripped all around in my apartment. I served up extra greasy pad thai, which she'd gobbled up happily with a radiant smile, praising me for how lovely it had tasted. I adored my pad Thai dish myself the first time I tried it—it was a difficult dish to mess up considering I had made it for myself for dinner for nearly two months straight at that point (a detail I neglected to tell her).

She told me I was the first person apart from her parents (a handful of years deceased now) that had ever seen her powers, fierce, aggressive abilities that she had been trying so hard to reign in, had manage to keep under check since she was a child. In the last year, however, the task had become steadily more difficult, the most difficult _it had ever been_—as her powers grew stronger, the dosages for her exacting, pharmaceutical cocktails had to be carefully adjusted, increased here, decreased there, but that the medications were starting to take a harsh toll on her body as a result, from years and years of her having been exposed to them-

"I would just find myself fainting a lot or suffering from extremely vivid hallucinations… sometimes I'd sleep for so long, a whole day once," Elsa explained, sighing, her worried gaze trained on her feet after she'd returned to the couch to sit, "Now this," she gestured at the sparkling ice all around her, "I'll just get caught in these dazes where I don't exactly know where I am or where I'm going and I'll just pass out. It happened for the first time last week, and luckily I was in my loft at the time. To have ended up at least ten blocks away from a friend's place this morning though…" Elsa shook her head, at a loss, her bottom lip held tightly with her teeth.

She could never completely crush the thing inside her that wanted to break free and run loose as if it lived and thought separate from her, caged in her body. It was an absolutely beautiful thing I told her, repeatedly, what she was able to do, the multitude of things she could create at will, but she only saw a blade far too heavy for her too wield, one that would strike without her permission, one that could kill without her control. Something about me, the way I had looked at her and the tears I had shed openly, had suppressed it. "For the first time," Elsa marveled, "It became calm."

It was a part of her, the ice, it was _Elsa:_ the fears she ignored at night, the anger that begged for her to be imperfect, the sadness that fed her loneliness, imposed and not imposed—the ice was a natural extension of her spirit, her heart. The ice spiked and shot and crystallized and flurried just as easily and naturally as one would sweat or breakout in goosebumps when they felt scared, as one would cry and shudder with sobs when they felt hurt or despondent. I could never get Elsa to see or understand this. She hated thinking that it was a part of her, that it came from anything good and pure, it was a parasite that feasted on her most unruly emotions, she only ever wanted to be free of it.

Elsa had been desperately attempting to figure out what about our first meeting had kept the ice at bay as if I was the miraculous key, her walking talking cure. She visited me at my East Village apartment once a month after that, those days we'd spend working out theories amidst greasy take-out lunches and even greasier diner dinners with the occasional stroll through the park to get some air, that elusive spark of inspiration. Then two months before she disappeared, the last time I saw her: we had booked a whole day up in HoliMont, skiing and chasing in the abundant Spring snow. I wanted her to see that what she could do was incredible, to celebrate it, she never had to be afraid of it—I wanted her to see that I cared more about her than just some nerdish, comic-book fantasy come to life (human boy helps out beautiful mutant), it was never that. Then, I didn't have the courage to say it: I have feelings for her.

I struggled for weeks and weeks, sleep evading me like a surly ex-girlfriend. I wanted to call the police, tell them what I knew. I had vowed to Elsa the very first day we met to never reveal her secret, and we had both known deep down: who in their right mind would believe me if I did tell? Then the weather turned unimaginably frigid in a matter of days, soon after her disappearance, icy storms swirling through and around New York like furious, unsettled specters, inches and inches of snow burying cars and houses for stretches and stretches that the eyes couldn't trace, there was nothing all around but a white the color of silence.

I knew then that something was very wrong.


End file.
